Earlier this month, the Arkansas Department of Education terminated a proposed $99 million contract with the company Solution Tree. This came after the company’s CEO, Jeff Jones, asked to withdraw the company’s proposal to provide professional development services to educators.
Solution Tree currently has a 7-year contract that expires June 30, and right now, there’s uncertainty whether anyone will be contracted to provide those services next fiscal year. In a statement from the Department of Education’s spokesperson, the department “felt it was prudent to do its due diligence and address additional questions and concerns before moving forward with the contract.”
Ozarks at Large’s Matthew Moore recently spoke with Jones about all of this. He says Solution Tree’s relationship with the state of Arkansas dates to 2016 and then-representative Bill Gossage.
The following is an edited transcript of that conversation.
Jeff Jones: He came from education. He had implemented professional learning communities in his school and then became a legislator and was saying, ‘This really works, we have to change education in the state of Arkansas, this has to happen.’ So, he brought a handful of legislators to what we call our summit, which is our big event in Phoenix, Arizona every year around the first of February. He came, Brian Evans came Jon Eubanks came and some others, they let us know they're coming. We hosted them to the whole thing, they went to the event just like every other attendee. There's 2,500 people who come to these events. We had some sessions where they talked to some of the presenters. They came back to Arkansas, regrouped, worked with us, contacted us again, came back to the 2017 summit in Phoenix. And at that point, we started writing how we could help Arkansas.
So, what they wanted to do is take 10 schools in cohort one, and it was $4 million. So, it's $400,000 per school and to implement deeply professional learning communities — there's something like 50 on-site days of professional learning communities. And if you implement it with fidelity, you end up getting great results. So you got to try and figure out.
They did an application process, Schools applied to be in the 10 schools. So, that's the process that they went up. Well, they found that it was working so well, not only were we getting great results, but also the schools are clamoring for it. So, four of the seven years that we are in the contract, they increase the number of schools that we're going to be in it. That's how the contract grew in size, by design. But it was $100 million that went to legislation that says over the course of seven years, we've got this pool of money that we're going to do, which is really interesting, because in the seven years, they ended up spending $83.9 million with us for this whole contract. [According to the state of Arkansas, the final number is $86,629,726.98]
And it came into question like how did this contract get so big and how did it become $149 million dollar contract? Well, for one, it's not $149 million dollar contract. We've gone back and we uncovered that if you go to transparency.arkansas.gov, There's our PLC at Work Project, which is [$86.6 million]. There's another one in there for $66 million dollars that we have no idea what it is. And we went to the statewide procurement office, and they don't know what it is. There's no paperwork, there's no contract. It's just listed. So, you combine those two numbers, you get to $149 million, but our name is attached to it, and we can't find out who signed it or who put it in. So, it's an [$86.6 million] contract, of which each year it went back to the legislature for approval. And for those seven years, they said, ‘we're not only going to approve it, we want to add more money to it.’ All the legislators get to vote. So, it's not like there was any secret about this. This is extremely transparent. And again, we don't know where the misinformation came that there's another $66 million. Nobody in their office can figure it out.
Matthew Moore: This contract is coming to a close, and so a new contract was sent out for a request for proposal. Solution Tree was one of eight companies who placed a bid with the Department of Ed to do this work. Your contract was rated the best. When did things begin to deteriorate?
JJ: How did everything so good get so bad so quick? So yeah, it was it was an RFP around professional learning communities, again. But the interesting thing is there are two pieces that go into this: You could either do 500 occasions, which was part of the RFP, or you could build a systems of professional learning, a comprehensive plan. Well, obviously we went towards the comprehensive plan, the systems of learning, the whole thing. If we'd have gone for the 500, our price would have been the same as everybody else is around $20-some million over the course of that. But we already knew where comprehensive.
I don't believe that anybody else submitted a full comprehensive plan, because you almost can't. And actually, if you took our cost per service and broke it down per session, we were cheaper than most of the competition for what we were trying to do, but we had such a robust plan.
How it became so controversial so fast … you could say that it's because competition was not happy that Solution Tree is going to win this big contract again. You could say some legislators that had the desire for these other people to do it, do it. You could say somebody looked at it and said, ‘whoa, $149 million, what is that?’ How quick that came out. You could say, well, this University of Arkansas report came out extremely fast. And it was disparaging about what our project is. And so, everybody's going to say, whoa, whoa, wait. So, we then went through the whole process.
You know, it was on Tuesday, we were fine, we're coming back on Friday, everything started to go, we were in communication. And you could see that the scope of the project was going to switch to the LEARNS Act, which there's several things in the LEARNS Act that were not capable of addressing: merit pay, tutoring, a whole bunch of things in there. So, if the contract was going to switch, because all this controversy was stewing around, to focusing on the LEARNS Act, not only will we set up for failure, but we were set up to spend Arkansas's money and we can do it.
MM: When you were first given the request for proposal, I know that there tends to be language around what are the expectations, like what are the desired outcomes for the work that you're doing. Was the LEARNS Act talked about it all in the request for proposal?
JJ: The original proposal was back quite a way, so I can't respond to exactly what was in the RFP. But the RFP was again for professional learning comprehensive plan. It didn't say “LEARNS Act” in it, but there were some components in it. So, when we responded, our plan had nothing to do with any of the other things. It had everything to do what we know how to do, which is extend the professional learning communities at work. The review committee gave us a perfect technical score. Now, if there was going to be a twist in the Learns Act that was not in the RFP and you can't go through all the details of everything that you want done in one RFP, it then became known that it was more and more going to lean towards Learns Act. I think it morphed. I think there was a lot of behind the scenes conversation of, ‘we really need to support this LEARNS Act. And if we're going to spend $149 million’ — which it's not — ‘or even if we're going to spend $99.4 million, we need to address some of these other priorities.’ But it came towards the end of the whole process.
I've said this before, I don't have anything against the LEARNS Act. The LEARNS Act is what Governor Sanders ran on. It's no secret what was in there. It's her plan. I'm not going to say it's right or wrong because that's not my area of expertise. That's her plan and everybody voted for it, so let's go for it. Let's make it work. I have nothing against her LEARNS plan at all.
MM: So your concern there is that the work that you do and the work that your company does wouldn't be compatible with what they are hoping to attain with the LEARNS Act?
JJ: Not all aspects of it. A lot of the LEARNS Act we certainly can do. It seems to us that the scope of the project was changing, not just around professional learning communities, and that it was going to be evaluated on an annual basis, if you're achieving these things that are attached outside of professional learning communities. And again, we're not pulling out of Arkansas, we just pulled our contract out of consideration. And whatever the state wants to do, if we can do it, we will apply. If we can do it, we won't apply. It seemed like the overall plan was changing on what they wanted to have done to fulfill their goals. We wanted to be fair and honest and say, you know, we should pull out.
And to be honest, we're also being villainized. So, you know, I don't know. We're going to be under a magnifying glass and everybody's going to find exactly everything that we might be doing wrong. It'll be on the news again.
MM: Say more about that. When you say you're being “villainized,” do you think people are taking out a context what do you do? What do you mean specifically by that thought?
JJ: Well, I probably shouldn't have said that … I walked right into it. The University of Arkansas report. I sent it to two scholars that I know. I sent it to two independent researchers that I know. And we sent it to five university research centers. And every one of them called the validity into question. And they had specifics into question. And they're all consistent. Was it statistically significant? It wasn't statistically significant. The matching process was invalid. Sampling has a concern. Baseline equivalence had concern. Study design, for instance, they used a study design that’s called an event study. An event study is only suited to evaluate the impact of a one-time event, not a long term effect with multiple variables in control. So that was one. They had weighted achievement, which is highly concerning. It's how a study is calculated weighted biased against PLC at Work. And then here's value added models.
So, this came out and it said in partnership with DESE, except the Department of Education doesn't know exactly how that happened either, and how their name got attached to it because I think what they're probably doing was using DESE’s data. I don't know that they were in partnership with DESE.
MM: And DESE stands for?
JJ: Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
MM: So, what you're saying is that the department didn't claim that they were a partner of this study. What likely happened is they used data that DESE gave them.
JJ: That's what we're assuming because it says in partnership with DESE. And it probably was supposed to have said in partnership with DESE data. I don't know. The report was done very fast. It didn't have peer reviews. All sorts of things.
If you're a legislator or if you're somebody who's concerned about a $99 million contract like you should be or could be, and this report comes out, that's your evidence of effectiveness that we got a problem. There's something's wrong. And we have reams of evidence that shows what we do works. We've been doing it for 27 years. If we don't do it right by now, who would buy our stuff?
MM: What has your experience been with Secretary Oliva?
JJ: I've never met him. H been to some of our events. We've got an office in the Simmons building that we do a lot of our training at to make it easier. The Department of Education has access 100% of the time for no cost just to come use it for training centers, which they do for things that aren't Solution Tree driven, but they can do them. So, he knows us. He knows our work. He knew it in Florida.
My empathy is that his job is huge. I mean, if you're in charge of pre-K through higher education in the state of Arkansas, coming from the state of Florida, as fast as you can go, where the new governor who's changing a lot of the different things to the LEARNS Act. I'm sure he was part of helping design the Learns Act just because he's a great educator from what I understand. I think he's got a tough job. I think he's got a really hard job.
MM: What do you hope people know about Solution Tree that maybe they haven't seen written about or you know talked about in the media?
JJ: That's a great question. We have been doing this for 27 years now. This is my 27th year of leading this company. And in 2001, I had seven employees and myself. That was it. That's the whole company. Now we're 385 or something around the country like we had talked about before. And in 27 years and in all the business that we've done, I have never once had the company's integrity called in the question, not once.
This is painful to me. This is gut wrenching. One of our guiding principles is integrity, period. It's the most important guiding principle. So to have our integrity and have what we do called in the question and some of the things that have been written about us, it hurts. So, what we're going to do is everything we can. We're not going to defame somebody else, but we are going to defend our work. We are going to defend our research.
Right before this conversation, I just had a report on research firms that we're now going to reach out to that's going to build the evidence of effectiveness like we did with Ed Northwest for Arkansas into all of our contracts. We're going to have what I call “plug and play,” which is one where we're going to collect and give you the data or we can build into contracts. We're going to have independent researchers because our stuff is tested and proven.
MM: One of the things that I'm sure you're worried about is that your work to improve education and to elevate teachers to their best possible version of themselves has gotten politicized through all of this. How do you combat that?
JJ: The only way we can combat it is just by having the data. I mean data rules. That's another one of our guiding principles: data rules. We're just going to keep telling our story. We're just going to keep doing our thing. If somebody disparages us, we're going to defend ourselves, but we're not going to go attack anybody. I'm not going to attack any legislator. I'm not going to attack any competition. It is what it is.
Ozarks at Large reached out to the Department of Education to request an interview about this contract and to ask about the $66 million contract listed under Solution Tree that they claim they do not have. Their spokesperson declined multiple requests for interviews and clarification around the contract.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline by reporters. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. The authoritative record of KUAF programming is the audio record.
